Culture Cab

"After studying the world's cab-riding habits at some length," announced Tomo-michi Tanaka, a bristling, bossy little ex-lieutenant general of the Japanese army air force, "I find that Americans and Europeans like to ride up front. This is a sign of higher culture. They don't like to see the rear view of the sweating driver. In the East, due to low culture, passengers ride in back. In Siam, for example, so low is the culture that the law forbids push-type cabs for fear the passengers will be assaulted by the drivers."

After Japan's surrender, General Tanaka decided to do something about this cultural problem. Japan's streets were crawling with a new three-wheel pedicab which had largely displaced the old, coolie-pulled jinrikisha.* These provided the driver with pedals to push with, but they still left him boorishly up front. Visionary Tanaka decided to give his country a more cultured conveyance. He took his savings and ordered a tricycle pedicab built, with the driver's seat in the rear. Then he hired himself out as a ricksha boy.

"I often dreamed myself back into my bombers," mused the ex-general, "and went sailing through the skies." After three years, 57-year-old General Tanaka had turned his single pedicab into a fleet of ten. Still it was not good enough. "Bicycles and jinrikishas are too laborious," roared the veteran fighting man to his cowering assistants at their garage one day. "Automobiles are still a luxury. It is I who must find a middle ground."

Last week, standing in the rain before Tokyo's Imperial Palace, General Tanaka barked another set of orders in the name of a greater Japan. Once again a roar of motors responded and the old commander's new squadron, a fleet of seven jaunty green motorized pedicabs, went putt-putting down the macadam road on their test flight. They have the name "Qu' avec"--a Japanese notion of the way a Frenchman might say "With whom?" "I call them 'Qu' avec,'" simpered Tanaka, "to indicate that boy & girl might get together pleasantly in pedicab."

With 50 "Qu' avecs" already built, the general hopes soon to export his cabs all over the Orient. "I will succeed," he admits, "because I am alert. I had to be to become a lieutenant general. After all, Japan spent 500 million yen on my education, counting the cost of the planes I lost in my command and the training of the men killed in them."

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